Pages

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

Surely it
is now a matter of time before Greece exits the Eurozone. Only the deluded (and
Angela Merkel) still believe that Greece will abide by the Draconian austerity
measures imposed on that country.

The Greek
voters have severely punished the pro-austerity main-stream parties on both
sides of the centre. The vote share of the two parties New Democracy
(right-of-the-centre) and Pasok (left of the centre) collapsed. Pasok, which, in the 2009 elections had garnered 44% of the votes,
saw its vote-share tumble down to just over 13%.

The country
has seen the sudden rise of the ultra-left Syriza party, with its young leader
(described as charismatic in some newspapers) Alexis Tsipras, now being asked by
the Greek President to see whether he can cobble up a coalition.

Tsipras
says he wants to stay in the Euro but rejects the austerity measures. He wants
to renegotiate the terms with Germany. It is a bit like a hedgehog wanting to
negotiate the right of way on a country road with a steam-roller.

In any case
Tsipras simply does not have the requisite numbers. Pasok leader, Evangelos
Venizelos, is refusing to renege on his party’s pledge to implement the terms
of Greece’s aid package. So he is not going to join hands with Tsipras, who is
against austerity measures. At the other end are the Communists, who have
rejected Tsipras because they want out of Euro.

There will probably be another election in a few months, and the pro-Euro parties may feel that they have another chance to curry
favour with the voters. The chances of Ed Miliband discovering charisma are
higher than that happening.

There are
really only two options left for Greece. Either it negotiates an orderly exit
from the Euro or it is kicked out. The former would be the preferable. Berlin
will accept that the Greece politics has become so fragmented (or polarised or whatever term that is acceptable) that
the politicians will find it impossible to get the Greek public round to the
idea that it is in their interest to stay in the Euro, which means that austerity
measures—which have hit the poor and the public sector work force the hardest—are
inevitable. There is always a teeny-weeny chance that the military will step
in, in which case we shall have the pleasure of witnessing the first military dictatorship
in the Eurozone. And Greece won’t be the only one to leave Euro. Other
peripheral countries such as Ireland, Portugal might leave Euro too. Perhaps Germany and its
allies such as Netherland can form a group and have its own currency, and the
rest of them (Spain, Italy included) can continue with a devalued euro.

The other
scenario is of course that one inconclusive election will be followed by
another one and essentially there will be anarchy. The reforms demanded by
Berlin (and Brussels) will not be met, and with no Eurozone aid there will be
no money left to honour contracts and pay public sector workers. Greece will be
where Argentina was a few decades ago and Iceland a few years ago. There will
be no money left to pay the creditors and the country will be declared
bankrupt.

The
headache for Brussels and Berlin is that Greece going bankrupt will have a
direct knock-on effect on other Eurozone countries such as Ireland, Spain,
Italy, and Bulgaria. Investors may start pulling their funds out from these
countries which would leave Berlin and Brussels with a bill that would be
larger than if whole of Greece were to subsist entirely on the Eurozone
largesse.

The Spanish
economy, the fourth largest in the Eurozone, is just a few notches above the
junk status. The economy is in recession for the second year running and
unemployment has risen to 25%. The government borrowing has jumped to 6%, and,
if Spain, whose economy is seven times the size of Ireland, needs a bailout it
will cost the Eurozone hundreds of billions of pounds. Spain’s property market
has collapsed and Bankia, its fourth biggest bank, created by amalgamation of
seven struggling banks, is more exposed to property than a P-listed British
diva to the Caribbean sun. Spain’s conservative government (elected in 2010)
announced that public sector money won’t be used to prop up struggling banks.
(Sounds familiar? I will bet my ex-girl friend’s life that tax-payers’ money
will be used as a ‘last resort’.)

Portugal,
which has negotiated (so far) a 78 billion euro bailout deal, is scrapping 4 of
its 14 yearly public holidays. The wages of public sector workers have been cut
and taxes have been raised. It’s like arranging the deck-chairs as the Titanic
sank.

The newly
elected Socialist French President, Francois Hollande, is making noises about
focusing on growth. However, his idea of growth is probably different from the
idea of growth of others in the Eurozone. Hollande would not be in a hurry to
reign in the role of the state, and would go on about loser (and easier) fiscal
and monetary policies. Also I don’t think Germany is fully convinced about it.
Germany may pay lip service to growth, but what it is pushing for is austerity
measures, although that is not working either (as events in Greece and Spain
demonstrate). When troubled countries are forced to trim their spending very
fast (and simultaneously raise taxes, which is what is happening in Britain,
too), it actually makes it much more difficult for these countries to reduce the debt
as percentage of the GDP—because the GDP itself is shrinking. As a Euro-sceptic friend of mine (he hates the Germans) never tires of reminding me, euro is beneficial only to Germany and to no other country. They tried to take over Europe twice in the last century, but were unsuccessful. It might be third time lucky for them. (It never ceases to amaze me how these fanatics manage to turn any debate to the subject of their pet-hate.) This friend is also predicting that the USA is headed for a fall and is advising anyone who is willing to give him an ear (mercifully not many) that they should buy Swiss franks and yuans, the Chinese currency (an advice he is regrettably unable to follow himself, as he last worked in 2002). He told me in a conspiratorial tone that Russia, India and Brazil are already settling deals in yuans, as they know that the dollar is going to lose its status as the world's reserve currency.

The BBC
economics editor, with her defiantly optimistic view, wrote that these developments
need not spell the end of Eurozone, but uncertain times are ahead. (I have been
saying this since 2008). What seems to be happening is that the crisis is moving up the food chain. Spain is next; and after that Italy.

I think the
next book I will read is As I Lay Dying. It is chosen by the
bookgroup which has extended a cordial invitation to me to join. More about it
some other time.

Tuesday, 8 May 2012

I am
currently reading two novels by women writers. One is entitled Mr.
Rosenblum’s list, with a subtitle that is longer than the queues at Heathrow.
It is the debut novel of Natasha Solomons. The other is entitled It’s
a Man’s World, which also has a subtitle. It is the sixth novel of
Polly Courtney, a former investment banker.

Mr Rosenblum’s List is about a Jewish man who arrives
in England from Berlin as a refugee, becomes wealthy by hard work and
enterprise, and is driven by a desire to assimilate—be like an Englishman. Towards
that end he wants to become a member of a golf club. Except that no golf club
would have him as a member (because he is Jewish). Undeterred Mr. Rosenblum
decides to build his own golf course and buys a cottage and 60 acres of land in
rural Dorset.

Mr. Rosenblum’s List has apparently been translated into
nine languages. The front page of the paperback edition has a comment from The
Times, which described the novel as hilarious. I am almost half-way
through the novel, having read 150 of its 310 pages. So far, the novel, while
not tedious, is not exactly gripping either. The protagonist Jack is obsessed
about building a golf course, helped by a hick from the nearby village. The narrative
is not particularly riveting and, while I would like Jack to complete his golf
course, the truth is I couldn’t give a toss whether he succeeds or not in his
endeavours. He is just not very interesting. I am also marooned in that section of the
novel where there is rather a lot about golf courses and golf-related scenes—about as
interesting as watching my moustache grow, as I have zero interest in golf. Jack's wife, Sadie, is a bit more interesting, but her character is not developed sufficiently. (The tedium is not relieved by long and repetitive descriptions of Dorset seasons and the flowers in the region.) Which
is a pity. The novel started with the quaintly charming list of means and ways
to become English. I am tempted to throw
in the towel, but will probably persevere, seeing as I have only 150 more pages
to go. I don’t know what twist in my character compels me to carry on reading
novels I don’t find interesting. Not finishing a novel feels like a personal failure
(when it ought to be seen as the failure of the writer to write a novel
engaging enough to keep the reader interested). At least I didn’t buy the
novel, but borrowed it from the library. The book is a bit like Aero chocolates: there is not much substance in it.

I have written on this blog about Polly Courtney when she publically ditched her
publishers (Harper Collins) because they had the cheek to promote It’s
A Man’s World as a chick-lit, i.e. something frivolous and racy when
what Courtney had attempted to do was write a novel on an important social
issue with a sombre message. It
interested (and amused) me to see a writer who (from the description
provided of said novel seemed like a chick-lit) throwing an apoplectic fit that
the publisher promoted it as a chick-lit. It was a bit like a butcher waving a
shoulder of lamb and shouting, ‘What? They killed a lamb?’ I had not read It’s A
Man’s World at that time (but I didn’t allow such trifles come in the
way of banging out a post).

Therefore,
when I spotted the novel last week in the library I decided to give it a go.

I have read
only the first two chapters of It’s A Man’s World, but already I am
finding the novel engaging and reasonably entertaining. It is an easy enough
read (partly because so far there are lots of dialogues—which I find easier and
quicker to read—rather than descriptions of nature). Also I think I am more
keen to find out whether Alexa, the heroine of It’s A Man’s World holds
her own as a managing director of a lad’s magazine than whether Jack completes
his sodding golf course.

Wednesday, 2 May 2012

Pearl Buck, the first American woman to win
the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1938), was a prolific writer. In her long
life Buck published more than 70 books of fiction and non-fiction.

Of the more than 35 novels Buck wrote
probably the most famous, certainly the one for which she is most remembered,
is her second novel, The Good Earth. It won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1932. Six years later, when Buck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature
(within 12 years of her starting to write), The Good Earth was one of
the two books (the other was a biography Buck wrote of her parents) the Nobel committee
heaped praise on. Buck was praised by the Nobel committee for her ‘rich and
truly epic descriptions of the peasant life in China’.

Upon its publication The Good Earth, which
vividly depicted for the Western readers—probably for the first time—, the peasants’
lives in rural life in China, became a best-seller. Over the decades it has
sold millions of copies, and it is said that the novel has never been out of
print in America.

Pearl Buck was perhaps best placed to give
the Western readers a panoramic view of what until then were poorly understood
‘oriental’ culture and country. Daughter of a fundamentalist Christian
missionary, Buck had spent her childhood and adolescent years in China. She was
bilingual and could speak Chinese fluently (indeed, according to WikiPedia she
also had a Chinese name). She returned to America in 1911 (on the eve of the
Boxer revolution) where, three years later, she graduated. In 1914 she returned
to China, where she lived for the next twenty years. In 1931, when The
Good Earth was published, Buck had spent all but three of her 39 years
in China.

The Good Earth tells
the story of a man called Wang Lung, who starts his life as an impoverished
peasant, leading a hand to mouth existence, in the north of the country; but
attains wealth and prosperity by intelligence and hard work. The period is not
explicitly specified, but it is most probably late 19th and early 20th
century, that is, the years leading to the revolution that overthrew China’s
last Imperial Qing dynasty. The novel opens with the wedding of Wang Lung. Born
into a family of poor farmers, Wang Lung can not aspire to marry anyone other
than a slave girl called O-lan in the house of one of the richest family (the
house of Hwang) in the nearby town. In the next 300 pages the reader is treated
to the vicissitudes of the life of Wang Lung, and, through them, day-to-day
lives and customs of the Chinese peasantry. Wang Lung might have been born into
a poor family, but he has a constant desire to better his lot. And he has
figured out that the way to prosperity lay in acquiring land. The problem is he
does not have the money to buy land, and, when the famine arrives in his region,
he, like many other farmers, is forced to leave his village and go to a
prosperous Southern city where his children beg and he does manual labour,
dreaming all the while to return to his land. When the revolutionary protests
reach the city and the rich flee, Wan Lung and O-lan are amongst the city’s
poor—most of them displaced villagers like themselves—who loot their empty
houses. Wang Lung returns to his village with silver and jewels and, with a
zeal that would have modern-day venture capitalists nod with approval, goes
around acquiring land. In due course the once-poor farmer who had to marry a
slave girl is one of the richest men in the region. Rich enough not to worry
when the floods arrive after seven years and most of the land is under water
(but rich enough to worry that other, poverty-stricken, farmers would attack
his house). In fact the floods present Wang Lung with the opportunity to
frequent a ‘tea-shop’—which also serves as a brothel— regularly, and, much to
the unhappiness of the faithful (but ugly) O-lan, who has borne him three sons,
Wan Lung brings home a mistress in the tradition of rich Chinese men of his
generation. Financially Wan Lung prospers year after year, but if you thought
prosperity brought the man happiness and peace of mind, you’d be wrong. All of
his sons are disappointments to him in different ways. The long-suffering O-lan
dies a painful, lingering death. And, as Wan Lung nears the end of his long
life, he realises that his sons do not share his love of the land that has
brought prosperity to the family.

The Good Earth is a
story full of family drama and intrigues, narrated in a style that suggests
that the unseen, omnipresent narrator is keeping her cool distance from them.
If it was only that The Good Earth wouldn’t have won the Pulitzer and would not have
fetched the Nobel for its writer. The Good Earth also gives the
Western reader a taste of what the life was in pre-revolutionary China. The
approach is unsentimental, but also non-judgmental. One guesses that Buck was
able to achieve this neutrality because she had grown up in China, watching its
way of life around her. Nevertheless it is still remarkable because Buck, a daughter
of fundamentalist Christian missionaries and married to one at the time, must
have had her Western identity and cultural values, which, to put it mildly,
were different from those in rural China. Buck might have spent all her life
until then in China; she might have had great love for the Chinese; she might
even have had a Chinese name; but she was not Chinese. In her core values she was
a Westerner. (Buck returned to America in 1934 as the climate became
increasingly unsettled and dangerous in the country with the civil war type
situation, and never returned to China, although that was probably not because
of want of trying. During the Cultural
Revolution Buck was denounced as an ‘American Cultural Imperialist’ and in
1972, when Richard Nixon famously visited Mao’s China, Chou En Lai refused Buck
the visa.) The narration of rural Chinese customs some of which, such as
foot-binding, must have seemed strange (to say the least) to the Western
sensibilities (while some others such as taking on a mistress and installing
her in the house would not have been totally alien, although it was not done
openly and attracted societal disapprobation). Some other practices such as
poor families selling female children as slaves to rich families were clearly
dictated by the grinding poverty—it was either that or death by starvation. The
approach of Buck towards what she must have seen all around her and that which
she depicted in The Good Earth befits that of a university professor (she
taught English at the University of Nanking throughout the 1920s)
dispassionately explaining a theorem. Nothing wrong in a writer wishing to keep
a distance from the characters in his novels; Arvind Adiga has done this
brilliantly in his Last Man in Tower. The Good Earth takes detachment to
another level altogether; reading it gives you the feeling of reading something
that is lacking in passion and vigour. The narrative is curiously flat, and matters
are not helped by the dialogues, which, while easy to read, sound (certainly by
today’s standards) dated. At no stage does the narrative suck the reader in the
dramas of Wan Lung’s life. The two main protagonists in the novel, Wan Lung and
his wife O-lan, do not really come alive for the reader, their inner lives do
not light up. Reading The Good Earth is akin to watching
an hour long documentary on the Masai warriors on the BBC: we learn a lot about
the quaint customs and practices of these African tribes (and depending upon
our dispositions may swoon or shudder), but we do not really understand how
they think. I guess this has happened
(in the novel) because Buck spent live amongst the Chinese, not with them.

The Good Earth is an outsider’s account of the life in rural China in
the late 19th and early 20th century. One can understand
why it appealed to the Western minds at the time of its publication. It
certainly is a landmark novel in the 20th century fiction in English language. Is it a great novel? Probably.

About Me

Welcome to my blog. This blog is mostly about books—20th and 21st century fiction and some non-fiction, to be precise—but not only about them. I shall be writing about some other interests of mine such as language, music, wine, interesting places I’ve been to, and random topics that happen to interest me at a given point in time.
I mostly read fiction, which comprises almost 90% of my reading.
In the non-fiction category I am interested in language, philosophy, travel, selected history, biographies and memoirs of people who interest me, and wine.
I love spending time in bookshops and attending literary festivals, although I have managed to attend only a few in the past few years.
I shall write on a monthly basis (let’s not be too ambitious) about a book I have read, though not necessarily in that month.
I hope you enjoy browsing through this blog.